Stocks and Dollars

Drug stocks have had a miserable month; the NYSE Arca Pharmaceutical Index down nearly 6 percent, far underperforming the fractional gain in the S&P 500. What gives?

Stocks struggled to end in positive territory but ended down as sovereign debt concerns in the euro zone kept a check on gains throughout the session. News that the Obama administration will work with Republicans on the tax dispute gave a brief lift to stocks.

Stocks fell in a choppy session on Tuesday but showed resilience in the face of Europe’s debt crisis, recovering some of their losses on more encouraging signs from the U.S. economy.

* Europe's woes offset by better U.S. data * Consumer confidence, Midwest manufacturing lend support * Volatility index gains on short-term uncertainty * Dow down 0.4 pct, S&P off 0.6 pct, Nasdaq off …

Jeb Handwerger submits:

In 1883, a historic cataclysm of 10 days shook the world and vaporized Krakatoa, an island between Java and Sumatra. An umbrella of ash rose 50 miles high and sent sonic reverberations seven times around the world. Deaths numbered 120,000. Scientists of that time were awed by the magnitude of nature’s forces that were being unleashed. They speculated that one day ways would be found to harness this energy. Even the Bible concurred with the physicists, that all inert matter contained particles of energy that if harnessed could provide inexpensive and abundant energy to replace the coal, steam, and oil that fueled the industrial revolution of that era. Now, if Faraday and Boyle could return to 2010 they could witness the fulfillment of their most visionary dreams with the advent of The Nuclear Age.

International demand for U2O6 is rising. Knowledgeable investors who made a killing when uranium reached $136 a pound in June 2007 are once again in the accumulation mode. The Russians, Koreans, and particularly the Chinese are investing in joint ventures all over the world to gain control of future supply.

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It’s the basic question when investing in a stock: is it on the way up or will it go down? To answer this question, Wall Street has developed numerous ways of attempting to predict what will happen, estimating various attributes tied to stock performance in order to determine what the future holds for a company’s valuation.

While focus has been firmly on Spain and Portugal in recent days with the Spanish 10-year yield down for the eleventh day in a row for a yield of 557 bp, Belgium has quietly be racking up debt like nobody else… or is that like everybody else! Debt-to-GDP is just

Price action on EUR/USD (a 4-hour chart of which is shown) as of Tuesday (11/30/2010) has just dipped tentatively under 1.3000, establishing a new 11-week low. Price action has continued its methodical bearishness of the past month (November), regularly breaking down below key support levels, pulling back (rallying) and retesting